Both Sides Claim Success as Diplomatic Row Wanes

JERUSALEM — After 10 days of public quarreling over Jewish building in East Jerusalem, the Israeli government and the Obama administration have each declared victory and started to make up. The Americans believe they have extracted important concessions from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; the Israelis think they have yielded little.

On Thursday, Mr. Netanyahu called Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to respond to specific requests she made a week earlier. The offers were not made public, but on Friday, Mrs. Clinton called them “useful and productive” and agreed with a BBC interviewer that her “escalated tone” had paid off; George J. Mitchell, the American envoy to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict whose trip here to further peace talks was delayed until the phone call, announced he would be arriving on Sunday. Mr. Netanyahu will be in Washington this week and is expected to meet with top officials, possibly including President Obama, another sign of reconciliation.

The Americans say they believe that the kind of rude surprise that occurred when Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was visiting here earlier this month — an Israeli announcement of 1,600 units of Jewish housing in a part of Jerusalem conquered by Israel in 1967 and claimed by the Palestinians — is not likely to be repeated in the coming months. That was one of Mrs. Clinton’s central demands of Mr. Netanyahu: no more acts that disturb the atmosphere as indirect talks with the Palestinians get under way.

The 1,600 units in East Jerusalem constituted the latest of several steps that the Americans considered problematic. The Palestinians felt exposed and the Americans were furious.

The Israelis, by contrast, say that while Mr. Netanyahu offered confidence-building measures for Palestinians in the West Bank, he made no concessions on Jerusalem. There are dozens of projects in the pipeline in Jerusalem, they said, and he has no intention of slowing down or interfering with them.

Whether he will quietly do so anyway, allowing each side the chance to go on claiming it won, remains to be seen.

Several days ago the prime minister’s office sent out a letter to the Ministries of Interior and Housing and the construction and planning committees for Jerusalem requesting a detailed list of all plans of more than 20 units in the city’s post-1967 neighborhoods. The letter also asked for all details on Ramat Shlomo, the neighborhood where the 1,600 units are to be built. The information was to be provided before Sunday night, when Mr. Netanyahu leaves for Washington.

The implication was clear: Mr. Netanyahu does not want to be surprised again by a construction announcement.

But will he act to stop the projects as they come up? He did just that two weeks ago when the mayor of Jerusalem was about to announce the redesign of a Palestinian neighborhood against the wishes of the residents. After Obama officials called him, Mr. Netanyahu called the mayor and got him to delay.

“I don’t think anything official will be announced, but I can imagine that there will be little building for Jews in Arab neighborhoods,” said a former official who remains a consultant to the Israeli government and would speak only on the condition of anonymity to guard his official relationship. “And on Ramat Shlomo I imagine the prime minister gave assurances that nothing would be built for some years.”

Photo

Ultra-Orthodox men in Ramat Shlomo, the neighborhood in East Jerusalem where planned housing caused a dispute between Israel and the United States.Credit
Amir Cohen/Reuters

Another government adviser, however, said neither of the promises had been made, nor would they be.

“If we are talking about any freeze in Jerusalem, the seven top ministers of the government did not agree,” he said. “I don’t see any concessions possible in Jerusalem. It is politically impossible.”

A senior official agreed. Speaking on the condition that he not be named, he said that Israel considered itself sovereign in Jerusalem and that even though the world disagreed, Israel would do nothing to foster, even tacitly, the de facto division of the city.

The discord with Washington has left the Israeli public divided and perplexed. In a poll published Friday in the newspaper Yediot Aharonot, 46 percent of 500 respondents said construction should be stopped in East Jerusalem, the section of the city claimed by the Palestinians, while 51 percent said it should not. Asked who was responsible for the latest dispute with Washington, 35 percent blamed Israel and 37 percent blamed the United States (the rest did not respond).

Asked whether Mr. Netanyahu led his ministers or they led him — he has a large coalition mostly of the right — 41 percent said he led, 47 percent said he was being led. Yet when asked to name the person they would most like to lead the government, Mr. Netanyahu still came out ahead of all others, with 41 percent selecting him. Tzipi Livni, leader of the opposition Kadima party, got 33 percent. The nationwide telephone poll conducted by the Dahaf Institute had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

“The public is confused, and the prime minister is confused by what has happened,” Yaron Dekel, a morning radio host and former Washington correspondent of Israel Radio, said in a telephone interview. “Both were taken totally by surprise by the Americans’ reaction, since building in Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem had never before produced such a response.

“I think this was an excuse for the Americans to teach him a lesson,” he continued. “Now they have made their point, and they are acting like lawyers trying to find the substance in things he supposedly offered. But on this point, he is not going to change.”

Meir Sheetrit, a member of Kadima, said the tension between Washington and Jerusalem was not really about building in Jerusalem but about Mr. Netanyahu’s failure to move peace talks forward in the past year. Mr. Sheetrit was a minister under Mr. Netanyahu when he was prime minister in the late 1990s and then a minister under Mr. Netanyahu’s successors, Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert.

“When we in Kadima were in power, we built lots of Jewish housing in Jerusalem, but everyone understood we were negotiating seriously for peace,” he said by telephone. “Since everyone sees this government going nowhere, every small action gives the perception that it is creating obstacles for peace.”

Mr. Netanyahu and his top aides disagree, saying that they have been pushing hard for negotiations with the Palestinians for a year and that there was no reason for the Americans to begin a public campaign against their Jerusalem building practices, which differ in no way from those of all previous Israeli governments.

They say that the disagreement over Jerusalem will simply have to remain while larger issues, like peace talks and Iran, take precedence.

“The difference in policy on Jerusalem is unchanged,” one aide said. “Still, there is definitely a desire on both sides to pull back from the brink of confrontation.”

A version of this news analysis appears in print on March 21, 2010, on page A12 of the New York edition with the headline: Clash Over Building in Israel Subsides, as Each Side Claims Success. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe